Shirin

A hundred and fourteen Iranian actresses and one French actress sit in an auditorium. On the screen a stage adaptation of the twelfth-century story of Khosrow and Shirin is playing. The camera never once turns to the screen; for ninety-two minutes we see only the watching faces. We follow the story through the sound, and what is happening through the expressions of the women. The real trick of the film is this: the women were not in fact watching anything. Abbas Kiarostami filmed them one at a time in the living room of his own house and asked them to look at dots stuck above the camera. He decided which story would be told only after the shooting was finished. Juliette Binoche happened to be visiting Iran at the time and joined the film by chance. What came out is not an adaptation but an experiment about the audience itself.